Could the ultimate amenity for luxury condos in the financial district be a brand new private school?

That was the logic of Claremont Preparatory School, which opened in September across the street from the New York Stock Exchange. The school invited a number of industry experts to its auditorium yesterday for a plenary discussion, “Destination Downtown: A Growing Community for Growing Families.” About 275 residential and commercial real estate brokers attended.

With thousands of apartments in the pipeline for Lower Manhattan, developers are trying to attract buyers with deluxe amenities and top-of-the-line retail and restaurant offerings.

And Michael Koffler, the president of MetSchools, the parent company of Claremont Preparatory, sees his school as another important factor in bringing more residents to the neighborhood. In a telephone interview yesterday, he said the event could help attract students to the school, which enrolled 55 students for its first year of operation and has the capacity for 1,060.

“Part of bringing so many people together at one time is it heightens awareness that there is an opportunity for private education downtown,” Mr. Koffler said. “These people are centers of influence that will have an impact over how people make their living arrangement decisions.”

Claremont is the first independent school that offers K-12 education to open in Manhattan in more than 50 years, according to Mr. Koffler, and the only private school of its kind below Canal Street. He said about 1,000 kids a year seek to enroll in private school but cannot because there are not enough openings.

The chief executive of the Corcoran Group,Pamela Liebman,was among the panelists.She said families would be the likely buyers of the thousands of residential units in the financial district.

Questions linger about whether families want to live in Lower Manhattan. The streets are narrow and low on air and light; the neighborhood has no large supermarket, and the retail sector is underdeveloped.

A developer and chairman of several real estate firms, Kent Swig, said the turning point of downtown’s retail market might be the expected arrival of Hermes, which was first reported in The New York Sun two weeks ago. The luxury retailer is finalizing a deal on space across the street from the stock exchange.

The chief executive officer of the retail and commercial real estate firm Newmark Knight Frank, Barry Gossin, said the Lower Manhattan needs an extra 20,000 to 30,000 inhabitants to transform it into a 24/7 community. That would ignite a lagging commercial and retail market, he said.

“People bring retail. Retail brings people,” Mr. Gossin said.

Asked about the current state of activities for downtown families, one panelist, Ethan LaCroix of Time Out New York, offered, “They can go to the movies.”